In Gmail’s HTML view filter creation, settings (including forwarding and POP), spell checker, keyboard shortcuts and address auto-complete were all unavailable. I also didn’t have any invitations. In the standard view, the only functionality missing for me had been keyboard shortcuts. While I can understand their wanting it to work perfectly in every browser, I was better off and had more functionality with an imperfect standard view than with a perfect HTML view. Thanks to Gmail for fixing that.

The popularity of painting often coincides with boom periods of art buying – the last time people spoke of painting as being “big”, for instance, was during the 1980s. New collectors, in particular, attracted to a buoyant art market, tend to go for paintings. Their ease of display, combined with their historical legacy and their aura of originality and uniqueness, means that paintings are unrivalled not as works of art, but as commodities. Perhaps the best way to view the current status of painting, then, is not so much as an artistic phenomenon, but as an economic one.